Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“Sorry?”

“He’s out sick.”

“Oh, right, that’s why I’m picking up his—materials.”

“What kind of materials?”

“Paychecks and any other materials that would be waiting here for him.”

The girl shrugged and tipped her chin in the direction of a grid of twenty or thirty cubbyholes on the wall at Lucinda’s left. These were labeled with last names, alphabetically. Lucinda scooped the bundle of envelopes and circulars that filled Matthew’s cubby and tucked them into her bag, trusting the checks to be among them.

“Is there a Dr. Marian or someone with that name here?”

“Down the hall to your right.”

The brass nameplate beside the pebbled-glass door read MARIAN RORSCHACH, B.V.SC., M.R.C.V.S., PH.D., DIRECTOR. The door was ajar, but Lucinda paused to rap on the glass. Classical music seeped from the room.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Marian?” Lucinda parsed a silhouette moving against a daylit window, fragmented to pixels by the door’s glass. She felt her heart lurch, regretting her gambit at the last moment, too late.

“Come in.”

Marian Rorschach wore a white coat too, over a black turtleneck that reminded Lucinda of Matthew’s own frequent costume, though Dr. Rorschach’s had been stretched around gallon-size breasts where Matthew’s was draped on a skeleton. Her heavy-fleshed face was deeply handsome, dark eyes glittering in pouchy seats. Her full black hair, bound Japanese-style in a sagging bun, bore a skunklike streak of white. She gnawed a paper clip while she studied a sheaf of papers open on her computerless desk as Lucinda entered. Now she removed the clip from the corner of her mouth and twisted a dial on a small transistor radio at her desk’s corner, lowering the volume.

“Can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”

“Concerning?”

“I write for the Echo Park Annoyance ,” said Lucinda. “I’m here concerning an alleged marsupial that may have been expropriated from your premises.”

“Expropriated.”

“In so many words, yes.”

Dr. Marian raised one eyebrow and gestured at a leather chair to one side of the desk. “Sit down.”

“Thank you, I’ll stand.” The chair was low and soft, a possible bid for advantage on the part of Dr. Marian.

“What’s your name?”

“My name isn’t important.”

“I see, I see.” Dr. Marian tapped her pen against her desk and studied Lucinda. “You talk like a cop,” she said suddenly, her tone heavy.

“Thank you,” blurted Lucinda.

“But I don’t think that’s where you got this wrong impression of yours,” Dr. Marian continued. “In fact, I don’t think you really know anything about any alleged marsupials at all, not from the sound of things.”

“You might think that and be wrong,” said Lucinda. This sport of insinuation recalled a game she’d played as a child, of pulling her fingers from underneath another child’s hands and slapping them on top, an escapade which inevitably turned frantic, then painful. “For all you know this rookie reporter might have stumbled into a very close encounter with the alleged aforementioned.”

“I’m glad you say rookie,” said Dr. Marian. “It saves me saying it.”

“I meant eager and tireless, not gullible.”

“Gullible is another excellent word I thank you for supplying.”

Lucinda opted for bluntness. “Your establishment is missing a kangaroo, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir. We’re missing nothing.”

“One of your protégés has gone guerrilla.”

“The person in question is a malingerer who takes too many sick days, nothing more.”

Lucinda found herself trembling under Dr. Marian’s imperious command. She understood Matthew better now, seeing the regime he’d been negotiating. It aroused her sympathy, and a kind of jealousy as well.

“The person in question liberated a martyr kangaroo,” said Lucinda, working to keep any sulkiness from her voice.

“A foolish legend that I’ve heard circulating.”

“I’ve seen the captive, living anonymously among apartment dwellers, like Patty Hearst.”

“As I told the police, no sane person, let alone a zoo employee, would keep a kangaroo in an urban apartment. For one thing an adult kangaroo defecates three or four times a day with results approximately the size of a baseball glove, a catcher’s mitt specifically.”

“No sane person,” Lucinda echoed.

“That’s what I said.”

“There’s sense in that.” Lucinda felt herself bent helplessly, like light in a prism, into service to Dr. Marian’s interests.

“I’m glad you see the sense in what I say.”

“Of course certain persons might in certain local situations have acted less sane than other certain persons might have hoped. And would now therefore be facing more or less exactly a three-to-four-catcher’s-mitts-per-day type of situation.”

“There’s only one answer for a person in that type of situation,” said Dr. Marian. Lucinda noticed, perhaps too late, a susceptibility in Dr. Marian’s responses for matching her interrogator’s rhythms. Might this have been exploited? More likely it was only a glimpse of Dr. Marian’s ability to absorb and redirect what came within her orbit, particularly anything threatening to the zoo’s priorities.

“What’s the answer?” said Lucinda.

“Get sane in a hurry.”

“I see. And if that person were to want to come in from the cold, so to speak?”

“As you should understand from what I’ve said, it is and always will be a nonevent.”

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” Dr. Marian gestured at the door. Lucinda found herself moving toward it.

“Dr. Marian?”

“Yes?”

“You haven’t ever given any thoughts to lending your gifts to a greater variety of causes, say for instance to managing a very promising rock-and-roll band?”

“Is that a question you ask at the end of every interview?”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t read the Annoyance , and I was wondering whether that was some sort of generic question, like what is your favorite color or are you a morning person or a night person, or if it had something to do with my work at the zoo.”

“No, it isn’t generic. You’re an extraordinary negotiator and I just wondered if you would ever think of representing a musician or group.”

“I’d have to hear their music first.”

“Thank you very much,” said Lucinda. “I won’t take any more of your time.”

acarpenter pried with his hammer’s claw at the joints of the cubicle, squeaking a bent nail from agonized plywood. Beside him Lucinda sat in the middle of the gallery floor with an un-ringing telephone between her knees. The complaint office was being hurriedly disassembled, subject to Falmouth’s hostility to lazy transitions. Lucinda and the interns had convened to handle a last round of calls, while Falmouth himself tore the black paper from the storefront windows. The phrase “no more complaints,” with which he’d instructed them to answer the phones, had already cued sobbing panic in a few habitual callers.

The cubicle dividers fell and bands of afternoon light saturated the deeper recesses of the gallery. The interns appeared exhilarated by the destruction. In intervals between murmured farewells to their complainers they refreshed themselves with yoga postures and cigarettes, with takeout Chinese and flirting with the carpenters. Falmouth fretted among them, sidestepping whisk-broomed piles of chips and dust that might accrue to his black cuffs. After the weekend’s dissolution he’d donned a crisp suit, scraped head and chin free of stubble. His firm gaze didn’t confess any memory of a crab-salty kiss. Lucinda sat alone taking sporadic calls, pining for what she hadn’t known she’d miss. The only complainer who mattered hadn’t called. Now the stage set was being struck.